In the fall of 2015, the parliamentarian Jeremy Corbyn assumed leadership of the Labor party, thus delivering it into the hands of the far left. Corbyn’s rise—with all that it might mean depending on the results of tomorrow’s parliamentary election—has been accompanied by the increasing frequency of anti-Semitic outbursts by Labor politicians and officials. James Kirchick comments:

The overripe anti-Semitic rot within Labor party smells worse than ever thanks to Corbyn, who, in addition to being a sympathizer of the Irish Republican Army and practically every anti-Western political tendency, spent more than 30 years on the backbenches consorting with a wide variety of Jew-haters. There was his well-known reference to Hamas and Hizballah as “friends”; his sharing a stage with Dyab Abou Jajah, the Lebanese man who called 9/11 “sweet revenge” and said Europe had made “the cult of the Holocaust and Jew-worshiping its alternative religion”; [and] his inviting the Israel Arab hate preacher Raed Salah to parliament. . . . Just recently, . . . it emerged that, less than a year before assuming the party leadership, Corbyn attended a ceremony in Tunisia where he laid a wreath on the grave of a PLO terrorist involved in the 1972 Munich massacre of Israeli athletes. . . . .

All this is necessary context for a recent survey that found 40 percent of Britons to be concerned about anti-Semitism on the right, but only 36 percent about anti-Semitism on the left. When the former is negligible and the latter is rampant, what explains the disparity?

One possibility is that Britons are simply unaware of the facts just enumerated and default to a conception that automatically correlates anti-Semitism with the political right. But this is hard to believe, considering the massive press coverage the various Labor anti-Semitism scandals have received in the less than two years that Jeremy Corbyn has been leader, and the absence of similar outrages on the right.

A second explanation is that many people don’t consider Corbyn & Co.’s obsessive anti-Israel activism to be anti-Semitism at all, but rather see it as a perhaps eccentric form of anti-imperialism—the premise presumably being that Israel is part of some global imperialist cabal or is a micro-imperialist power with regard to the Palestinians. This applies a nefarious double standard to anti-Jewish prejudice. . . . If Corbyn had spent 30 years sharing platforms with the [extreme-right] British National Party and Northern Irish Loyalist militants, would anyone at the Guardian or other fashionable precincts of the British left hesitate to conclude he was a racist, fascist, sectarian?

For some time, opponents of U.S support for Israel have been urging the White House to end the war in Gaza, or simply calling for a ceasefire. Douglas Feith and Lewis Libby consider what such a result would actually entail:

Ending the war immediately would allow Hamas to survive and retain military and governing power. Leaving it in the area containing the Sinai-Gaza smuggling routes would ensure that Hamas can rearm. This is why Hamas leaders now plead for a ceasefire. A ceasefire will provide some relief for Gazans today, but a prolonged ceasefire will preserve Hamas’s bloody oppression of Gaza and make future wars with Israel inevitable.

For most Gazans, even when there is no hot war, Hamas’s dictatorship is a nightmarish tyranny. Hamas rule features the torture and murder of regime opponents, official corruption, extremist indoctrination of children, and misery for the population in general. Hamas diverts foreign aid and other resources from proper uses; instead of improving life for the mass of the people, it uses the funds to fight against Palestinians and Israelis.

Moreover, a Hamas-affiliated website warned Gazans last month against cooperating with Israel in securing and delivering the truckloads of aid flowing into the Strip. It promised to deal with those who do with “an iron fist.” In other words, if Hamas remains in power, it will begin torturing, imprisoning, or murdering those it deems collaborators the moment the war ends. Thereafter, Hamas will begin planning its next attack on Israel:

Hamas’s goals are to overshadow the Palestinian Authority, win control of the West Bank, and establish Hamas leadership over the Palestinian revolution. Hamas’s ultimate aim is to spark a regional war to obliterate Israel and, as Hamas leaders steadfastly maintain, fulfill a Quranic vision of killing all Jews.

Hamas planned for corpses of Palestinian babies and mothers to serve as the mainspring of its October 7 war plan. Hamas calculated it could survive a war against a superior Israeli force and energize enemies of Israel around the world. The key to both aims was arranging for grievous Palestinian civilian losses. . . . That element of Hamas’s war plan is working impressively.